City Builder: Giving Back as a Way of Life

Mark Huber of Huber’s Custom Building has been building homes in the City of Seattle for over 35 years. His is a family business, employing his wife and daughter full-time, and a hand-picked team of sub-contractors who he has specially vetted to meet his high standards of excellence and workmanship.

Huber’s focus is on Four-Star Built Green™ homes that reflect each of his clients’ individual styles and budgets. In addition to custom homes, Huber has also found a niche building custom, in-fill developments, such as townhouses and additional homes on lots to make better use of limited, in-city land.

Huber’s Custom Building Company Founded: 1980 Employees: 3 full-time + 1 part time + sub-contractors Development Type(s): Custom homes with a specialty is 4 Star Built Green and In-fill developments Number of Projects per Year: 8 townhome units

But Mark Huber isn’t your typical business-owner; in fact, you could say he lives a double life. Most know him as a good family man and successful contractor. But Huber also raises funds and recruits people to help build homes for families in need in Honduras—and he started doing this in the midst of the Great Recession.

Since 2011, Huber, and his daughter alongside him, has been partnering with a local, Ferndale-based organization called Dwellings which connect people to Central American families who are homeless and living in extreme poverty. He and his daughter fly to Honduras several times a year, and to date, have helped build over 20 homes for these families who have no place of their own to call home.

Huber’s passion for giving back taps into a need we as humans have that makes giving such a rewarding experience. He has recruited family members and sub-contractors to join him, but his passion for his project knows no bounds. After building four townhomes in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Huber recruited three of the four homeowners to join him in building five homes in Honduras. These three homeowners (who call themselves “Team Eclectic”) have returned three times to continue helping out—and they’ve used their companies’ matching funds to donate toward the projects they’ve worked on.

As far as Huber is concerned, it’s a win-win situation. The Honduran families finally get a place to call home, and his friends, family and clients have the opportunity to learn how to swing a hammer and build a house, while also learning the bigger lesson of the importance of giving to others who are less fortunate than themselves.

“If I find a group of people who are interested in working with me to learn to build a house for a needy family anywhere in the world, I will go.” ~ Mark Huber

City Builder: Dwell Development Builds Smart, Efficient, and Affordable

Columbia City’s neighborhood blog, Columbia City Source, recently featured a video highlighting the ongoing work the Dwell Development is doing in the neighborhood, building energy efficient and affordable homes. We’ve featured Dwell’s work on passivhaus before and highlighted their unique approach to building housing. Dwell is partnering with the Seattle Housing Authority. Here’s more background on the video and their work in the Rainier Valley:

Dwell Development LLC, the award-winning design/build firm focused on building modern sustainable homes, is pleased to introduce the Columbia City Story: a sustainable micro-community in Columbia City’s Rainier Vista consisting of 42 homes with individual blue prints to make each home unique. The project began as a partnership with the Seattle Housing Authority and a commitment from Dwell Development to build 15 homes but due to the excitement and demand generated by the project, the Dwell Development team signed on for an additional 36 homes.

The philosophy of the project was to create a community within the bustling Columbia City neighborhood that brings together like-minded individuals who value community, sustainability and modern design. Each block of homes has a communal courtyard to encourage neighborly connections and a community garden to promote sustainable living practices such as growing organic vegetables. “It is actually a tour de force so to speak, where everyone can really enjoy living together, sharing habitat together and growing together,” says Anthony Maschmedt, owner of Dwell Development.

This project embodies Dwell Development’s ultimate goal of building beautifully designed net-zero homes that preserve the health of its inhabitants and the planet. The Rainier Vista community includes Dwell Development’s first Passive House – a voluntary standard for ultra-low energy buildings designed for comfort and efficiency. Passive House construction is centered on airtight spaces that reduce heating and cooling needs by incorporating extra insulation, high-performance windows, smart home technology and details in the design to support solar gains. Every home was designed with efficiency in mind; such as perfectly angled roofs to accommodate solar panels so the entire community is solar-ready.

City Builder: Real People Making our City

I said earlier this year that 2015 will be the Year of the City Builder. With that intention, we will start a regular feature here on Smart Growth Seattle that will  showcase the human beings that do the work of building our city. You’ll notice the image I chose. Whenever I am talking with people who are wary of new growth or who have genuine concerns about development, I will often point out that, “there is no Monopoly Man with a top hat and cane running away with bags of gold!” It always brings a smile or a laugh. The truth is that many, many good and smart people in Seattle think there really is a Rich Uncle Pennybags behind new growth.

We all know that this isn’t true. If anything, even investors and banks who finance local building are simply representing their investors, hard working people with deposits or pension funds. Builders and developers typically finance their projects, borrowing money and paying it back over time, with interest on top, using funds generated from operations. Those operating funds are called, usually, rent. Sometimes in the single-family market that payback comes after the sale of a house, usually from the bank or lender who is financing a new home for a buyer household. The whole system of housing is really an interdependent web of real people building and borrowing and lending and buying housing. George Bailey explains it best in the classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

There is no Rich Uncle Pennybags! It’s harder to hold a grudge against the people at a work site or the people working the loan desk at a bank or even the developer assistant putting numbers together in a pro forma than a fantastical mustachioed villain. The more we can get the message out that we’re all in this together, the more we can solve the challenges of how we grow sustainably in a collaborative and innovative way rather than through punitive measures like linkage taxes and impact fees. These kinds of fees hurt real people, not profits. When costs and the difficulty of building go up, so do rents and the cost of housing over all.

We’ve already highlighted the God Pods, a microhousing project that was donated to the Union Gospel Mission. We’re looking forward to sharing more stories about the people building our city.

I am grateful for the help of Marisa Rodriguez who’s by line you’ll be seeing on many of these stories. Marisa is an active MBA member with a strategic marketing and writing business who helps companies increase sales through marketing communications. She’ll be finding stories and writing about a variety of people building the city. If you have any ideas please let us know. You can e-mail me at Roger@seattleforgrowth.org.

HB 1084: Pollett Pushes Anti-Housing Legislation Again

Myth Buster: Gentrification or Desegregation?

It has become something of an article of faith for the antigrowth crowd that one big reason that growth is bad is that it unleashes something they call “gentrification.” Now it’s next to impossible to find a quantitative definition of gentrification; it’s mostly a know-it-when-you-see-it phenomena. I’ve written about how, when pressed, the argument that Seattle is a segregated city falls apart when looking at the distribution of affordable housing. Seattle really isn’t a segregated city at all when it comes to a diverse mix of incomes throughout the city. It’s worth considering on this Martin Luther King Day what actually benefits communities of color and poor people the most, stopping growth or welcoming it. An article in Slate by John Buntin takes on the Myth of Gentrification: